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She trusted a man she met online and ended up losing more than $60,000. She is now hoping to help protect others from making the same mistake.

Law enforcement say the internet, along with many dating sites, make a “sweetheart scam” an easy crime. Online a person can pretend to be anybody they want to be.

The woman we will call Alexandria says she met her love online via Match. Another member approached her, saying he was in a relationship, but his boss wanted to meet her based on a profile that he saw.
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“Alexandria” (credit: CBS)

Alexandria does not want to be identified which is why we blurred her picture and changed her name. She says she fell in love over emails and phone calls with a man allegedly named Harry Kane. They talked and emailed for a few months while he was overseas for work. “I saw that he had a house here locally and I thought, wow, that’s too good to be true.”

It was, she says.

The Central Colorado woman says she is ashamed that she was bilked out of $62,000.
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(credit: CBS)

She never even met Kane. After a few months of the computer courtship, her online love told her they would meet once he got back from business in Africa. He claimed to have an elevator installation company. That is when the requests for money began.

“It started out with maybe $500 dollars and then he kept upping the ante,” she says. “Then a crane broke down and he needed me to send money to fix the crane, so he could finish the job, Alexandria explains. She says that phone call was a $17-thousand dollar request. “It kept building up more and more and more,” she adds about the money requests.
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(credit: CBS)

Alexandria eventually reported Kane to the FBI but she says the agency has not even returned her calls.

In an unprecedented joint operation, Hong Kong, Malaysian and Nigerian police have busted a syndicate running online romance scams which duped nearly 90 women out of HK$60 million, ­local officials said on Friday.

The transnational racket, based in Malaysia, had swindled 73 Hong Kong women out of HK$58 million since 2014, according to Hong Kong police. The gang also cheated 13 Malaysian women out of HK$2 million.

The biggest victim was a middle-aged professional from Hong Kong who was conned out of HK$9.1 million, according to Superintendent Lam Cheuk-ho of the cybersecurity and technology crime bureau.

The woman became acquainted with the swindler through an online dating platform last summer, but nine months passed before she realised she had been duped and sought police help in April. It is understood her money was laundered through more than 10 bank accounts in Malaysia and Nigeria before police lost track of it.

The gang was allegedly headed by a pair of lovers – a Nigerian man, aged 36, and a Malaysian woman, 46. They were among 13 people nabbed in Malaysia last week during the joint operation. Hong Kong police officers went to Kuala Lumpur ahead of a series of raids between December 5 and 8.

[Police have carried out campaigns urging residents to watch out for telephone and online scammers. Photo: David Wong]

“Half of the core members were responsible for using computers to create fake identities, and searching for and contacting victims, while the other half handled crime proceeds and remitted the money out of Hong Kong and other countries,” Lam said.

Describing it as the “biggest and a sophisticated syndicate” that preyed on Hong Kong women, he said the gang also targeted victims in Europe, the United States and Australia.

Scammers typically disguised as “Caucasian” European or American men, claiming to be professionals in fields such as engineering, banking, business or the military, befriended victims online. It would usually take them at least one or two months to win the trust and sympathy of victims.

“Victims were told their so-called lovers would fly to Hong Kong to marry them and send wedding gifts and assets,” Lam said. “But they were then told the gifts and assets had been confiscated by local authorities and victims were asked for help to pay handling and administrative fees or a surety.”

Some victims were told their “lovers” had run into trouble and needed money urgently, among other excuses.

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Two Nigerian citizens were sentenced Thursday to 36 months in federal prison and could face possible deportation for their participation in a $2 million romance scam that started on Facebook.

Kunle Mutiu Amoo, 49, and Lanre Sunday Adeoba, 62, were ordered to pay a little over $86,000 in restitution, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud, according to U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson.

Amoo and Adeoba admitted their involvement in a scam that defrauded victims of money by making false promises or stating romantic overtures that the victims would be repaid.

The defendants pretended to be South African diplomats who needed the victim’s financial assistance to transport money into the United States. The two admitted in their guilty plea that they tried to defraud the victim of $506,000. The victim lost $2 million because of the scam.

Amoo and Adeoba will be in federal custody until they can be moved to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility at a later date.

U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett, who sentenced Amoo and Adeoba, said the two had abused a position of trust by pretending to be diplomats. He also noted the victim suffered severe financial hardship from their actions.

The woman was drawn into the scam after being drawn into an Internet relationship with a man she never met. The two Nigerian men posed as diplomats who were supposedly working with the man on a South African project, according to court documents.

Compared to other Internet-enabled crimes, romance scams result in the largest amount of financial loss among victims, according to the FBI. Victims of these scams, which are classified as confidence frauds, reported nearly $200 million worth of financial losses in 2015, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center

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About

Hi. I am Alan Prince. I created this blog in order to give you the very latest news and updates on romance scams and also, to let you know how you can date safely on the internet. Scams affect many lives. They cause pain, hurt and damages, financially, emotionally and in other areas of our lives.

I invite you to read through as many posts on this site as you can, then share it with your friends and loved ones on twitter,facebook and so on using the share buttons after each article. You can also direct people who are being scammed to this site to read the stories of others, and avoid being hurt. If you have lost to the scams, you will find help in the stories of people like you who were also scammed. Let’s join hands together to help others and defeat this menace on the internet. You never know whose life you could save just by directing someone you know to read this site. Cheers.

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